What is Leetspeak

Leetspeak is a slang which is also called as elite speak, hakspeak, leet or leetspeek. Leet means hackers and hackers were among the first to use this technique of encoding the words. It uses the combination of alphanumeric to replace the actual characters of the word. It is the way of communicating online with people by changing the spellings of the words or we can say encoding them. For example, the spellings of LEET will change to 1337 if encoded. Leetspeak is human readable form but some people can find it difficult to read these words. It is usually used by the people in message boards who want to discuss over a private topic so that no one can understand their conversation. Sometimes it is just used for fun. It can be used to make passwords too. It can be describes as a shorthand language too.

Leetspeak has now become an inseparable part of internet culture. It was primarily developed to defeat the text filters created by BBS and Internet Relay Chat system in order to discourage the discussion of topics like hacking and cracking. There are many ways to leet as someone can use 5 for “S” or someone can use $ for ‘S’. Some of the people think that leetspeak is great fun to use but some of them think that it is the destruction of English language. Leetspeak is not a consistent method to encode the words. The words can have different spellings. It was especially used by online gamers. Some of the teenagers or children use this method to hide their identity on internet from their parents so that they do not come to know what they are up to.

So parents must have some understanding of Leetspeak so that they can know what their children are doing on the internet. The result after encoding the words becomes indecipherable. You can yourself convert the words into leetspeak language if you know how to encode it. But if you don’t know then leetspeak converts are available on the internet from where you can convert plain text into leetspeak and vice versa. Till now, various methods have been evolved to encode the words through the method of leetspeak. “Xor” or “Zor” are common suffixes which are used for “er” or “r”. leetspeak has not yet gained much popularity but with time it is gaining popularity among the people. It is gaining the attention of the people and is becoming a unique language.